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First Frost by Sarah Addison Allen

I do love Sarah Addison Allen’s stories. It’s the joy of
reading about women full of strength and wisdom helping each other, pulling
together and valuing each other even while making the usual everyday mistakes and
missteps in life. And then there’s the magic – beautiful inner magic at the
core of these women that a small part of me clings to no matter how rational I
try to be.

First Frost sees
us back with the Waverley women of Bascom, North Carolina. If you’ve not read Garden Spells, then do. It’s not
actually necessary to read it before enjoying First Frost, but it’d be a great
shame to miss out on it. Sisters Claire and Sydney are at the heart of the
story, along with Sydney’s teenage daughter Bay. All three of them are
restless, frustrated, distracted and not entirely themselves as Autumn drifts
in. As they await the first frost of the season, signalling the rebirth of
their curious apple tree, they struggle to make decisions and find their path.

Claire’s catering business has been put to one side for
Waverley Candies, bringing her flair for knowing just the right ingredients to
a much wider audience. Her new fame brings a visitor, causing her to question
everything about her life. Sydney has her hands full with her newest employee,
and Bay has boy trouble. They need to pull together and look after each other.
Fortunately, the sisters are closer than ever now ‘the way adult siblings often are, the moment they realize that family
is actually a choice.’

There’s a smaller story I enjoyed very much too, about Anne
Ainsley and the stranger. Life had not been kind to her, and hers ‘was a life that accepted disappointment as
inevitable.’ She’s looking for stories...sounds familiar. The writing is
lovely; the descriptions of food are scrumptious and even the town itself is
tinged with fairytale – ‘It looked like
the world was covered in a cobbler crust of brown sugar and cinnamon.’ In
my mind, there is definitely something of Stars Hollow about the place; reading
Addison Allen puts me in the same place as watching Gilmore Girls (Seasons 1-4,
after that I made up my own endings).

I read it (twice), I loved it, and am already impatient for
more.

I read the book courtesy of the publisher and NetGalley. First Frost is available now in
paperback.

The story of Lizzie Borden has a whiff of folklore about it, it feels hazy to me, apocryphal perhaps, something half known and uncertain like Washington and the cherry tree or the ride of Paul Revere. Shamefully, I had to Google both the latter two examples to double check they were the events I thought I was referring to. I choose them deliberately though - is it my Englishness that makes these events fuzzy to me? Do these stories live in the American psyche the way Magna Carta, Henry VIII and his six wives, and Jack the Ripper (to select three almost at random) live in mine?
I remember a book we stocked when I was a very young bookseller at Waterstones in Watford that looked at the psychology of children who murder their parents. The copy on the back of the book talked of Lizzie Borden. I remember half wondering about the case, then shelving the book away and moving onto the next armful. But it stuck in my m…

My nieces and nephews and I have a monthly book club, called Book Chase (although it sometimes gains an extra 's' to become Book Chasse). The rules are simple: we all bring something we've read during the last month, talk about it to each other, and eat snacks. We live tweet each meeting with the hashtag BookChase. Sometimes, when we remember, we Storify all the tweets too. This month, we remembered!